Operating Principles for Effective Product & Marketing Teams
And how to avoid the things that kill them down the line
One Ride
The relationship between Product and Product Marketing is one of the most important partnerships in tech companies, regardless of stage. Both functions work on parts of an engine, but customers only experience the whole ride.
In Startups
In the early days of a startup, founders fill both roles. The lines between PM and PMM are often blurred in the early days. A dedicated PMM may be an early hire if the product requires extensive customer discovery across multiple segments in a competitive industry where go-to-market (GTM) strategy is critical, provided they can work independently.
Through Hypergrowth
At the growth stage, the market is more competitive. PM and PMM roles become distinct, especially if the startup begins operating within a functional (rather than business unit) org structure. The startup has a portfolio of products and serves more than one segment. The sales team is larger and more sophisticated. International expansion is on the table. GTM can make or break the startup. This is where PM/PMM dysfunction creeps up.
Don’t Hate the Late Stage
When the startup is a mature enterprise and there are more than 5 layers between the C-suite and ICs, PM and PMM become “organisations” in their own right. SVPs and VPs battle for influence and resources. Daily work becomes a draining negotiation of scope and priorities, and horse trading favours. One PM will have to navigate multiple PMMs who own different channels and segments. One PMM will have to navigate multiple PMs who own different products and features. Dysfunction is the order of the day. Everyone involved gets frustrated, without realising this is a systems problem.
Dysfunctional PM-PMM relationships are often symptoms of underlying rot. So a CEO must look at this holistically and nip it at the bud.
I’ve worked across all three stages, both as a PM and PMM. In my startup and with the CEOs I advised, I worked on both roles (among many others!). Over many years at Google, Coinbase and Ripple, I developed an intuition for what’s effective vs dysfunctional PM-PMM relationships.
Here, I’ll seek to generalise operating principles that may apply across all three stages.
Slop or Slope?
A lot of advice out there is cringeworthy, often because they take the perspective of just one function, ie “How PMMs can work with PMs”. Or worse, “PMMs are at the center of it all!”.
Others are of the “Well, of course!” variety. Of course, we need a product roadmap and shared OKRs. Of course, we need to focus on customer value rather than product features.
Therefore, I'll focus on broader principles, rather than basic tools like aligned roadmaps and launch calendars. I’ll also refrain from going down the rabbit hole of specific GTM elements (like packaging, pricing, etc) because these are context dependent.
Here, I’ll try to generalise broader operating principles for CEOs designing PM and PMM teams so we can focus on outcomes, rather than purely functional roles. My starting point is chapter 4 of Claire Hughes Johnson’s Scaling People. After spending the first few chapters on org foundations and developing individuals, Claire provides a useful masterclass on intentional team development. I highly recommend this.
But because this is for a wider audience, I think Claire purposefully skipped over how to be intentional with developing the relationship between two very different individuals: the product leader and the marketer.
But are they really different? In the good old days, both PMM and PM roles were played by the same person. In CPG, this was the “brand manager”. In tech, this was the product or product marketing manager. The functions diverged in companies like Microsoft, Apple, and HP in the 90s as products, features, and tools got more specialised.
Does this general demarcation still make sense, considering where the world is going?
Let’s look at actual PM and PMM job descriptions from Google’s careers page.
PM:
Work with partner teams (e.g., engineers, program managers, UX) during product design and development to implement the requirements to turn PRDs into OKRs for one or more teams.
Define product roadmaps by operationalizing strategy.
Develop and secure buy-in for a product idea that identifies, defines, and supports the overall product narrative and direction.
Validate the market size and opportunity (e.g., user-based, strategic opportunity, business growth).
Drive launches, maintenance, and retirement in collaboration with other cross-functional teams and stakeholders
PMM:
Own, define and execute the global strategy and campaigns for customer relationship management (CRM) marketing including goals, data insights, content strategy, and creative development to drive measurable business growth and product engagement.
Own relationship with Marketing, Product and Engineering stakeholders to align on goals, priorities, content strategies, new opportunities identification, target audience segmentation, and Key Performance Indicator (KPIs).
Create and drive program-related requirement documents, identify technical data requirements and use cases to support customer strategies and program goals.
Supervise and collaborate with Campaign Managers to brief, develop and produce campaigns successfully.
Optimize and manage email creative and production processes across multiple vendors, from creative briefing, email production, QA testing, launch and campaign analysis.
One can make a few observations here.
First, there’s a ton of overlap (OKRs, goals, opportunities, launches, campaigns).
Second, if you look at the bolded words, those are getting easier and more automated over time with a ton of new AI tools and applications hitting the mainstream.
Third, a highly competent generalist can be effective at both roles if they spent less time on the outputs (writing PRDs and campaign briefs) and more on decisions (Which of these 10 segments that we know a lot about is the priority? Among 3 GTM options, what is the right launch strategy?) and matters of craft and taste (Is this campaign tone deaf? Is this a beautiful onboarding journey?).
Hence, over time, I do believe that the most effective PM-PMM relationships are those that are mutually legible. That’s probably the first generalizable principle.
Create Mutual Legibility
Mutual legibility refers to PMs and PMMs operating together at a level of depth that though they are two distinct individuals, they deeply understand how each contributes to singular outcomes. It’s not just having an understanding of the other’s inputs and outputs, but also knowing how to recognise high standards in the other person’s work enough to ask the right questions and move the ball forward.
The best PMs can be great PMMs. While they can operate at a product roadmap level, they can also get into the weeds with positioning, messaging, and pricing. Conversely, the best PMMs can be great PMs. They can knock out of the park an insanely breakthrough product launch because they’ve helped build the product roadmap themselves. They think of distribution as an engineering problem with artful, creative solutions that spark deep human emotions.
In an ideal world, they’d be the same person. But as teams scale, the only reason to split PMM vs PM roles is whether someone either loves and gets energised by the marketing aspects of product, or the product aspects of marketing.
I think this is the philosophy that gets individuals - and by extension teams - operating at their peak. This makes the PM-PMM relationship self-reinforcing. And it starts with mutual legibility.
I think the way to implement this principle is to bake this into team charters and the hiring process. Often, the bar for PMMs is set lower, with a perception that it's a fallback for those who can't become PMs, or that PMs needn't focus on marketing. I saw this dynamic a lot at Google and Meta. I think this is wrong. We need to raise the bar for both.
Build shared systems.
I once encountered a situation where PMs were using Atlassian for knowledge management, project management, and issue tracking, while PMMs were on Asana.
PMs complained about not having transparency on marketing priorities and launch dates. PMMs complained about not having a good working relationship with Product.
Systems become incentives for everyday behaviour, so this led to a lot of transactional relationships. PMs make a lot of requests for data to fill in a blank in a PRD or product review (ok at a small scale, not ok when 1 PMM supports 10 PMs). PMMs make PMs review minutiae of launch content. Each one feels like a short order cook to the other’s work.
The solution is to provide both teams with shared systems and tools, reducing reliance on transactional requests. Meta’s internal tools were great, and though not perfect, most of them were internally developed which helped reduce the need for contracting with 20 other SaaS platforms that built artificial walls between teams.
Believe GTM motions are products.
One really effective principle I’ve seen is to treat GTM motions as products in themselves, because this is the user’s first contact with the product.
For example, an SEO-driven acquisition motion requires a thoughtful strategy to address user intent and offer solutions to immediate problems even before getting the user into the onboarding funnel. At Coinbase, this “product” was the series of webpages about various cryptocurrencies that allowed users to get educated, track prices, and keep up with the news even before making their first trade. In other companies, SEO is outsourced to an agency that produces countless blog posts.
At Google, I built a new retention motion around gamification for the Google Pay app. Unlike our competitors who were doing promotions over social media (and spending boatloads of cash!), our strategy was to deeply embed fun and social experiences on a payments app. Like most successful strategies, this started out as a side project among four people: myself, a PM, an engineering lead, and our local marketing lead. We built this 6 years ago (in 2019) and it’s still being used today.
Beware of teleprompter leaders.
This specifically refers to scenarios when the organization starts to grow and needs more “adults in the room”. Typically, PM and PMM VPs are brought in. And because these are leaders who grew up climbing the corporate hierarchy, they’re so far removed from the day to day work and cannot contribute in a meaningful way unless someone writes a script for them.
You’ll see this in many forms - new leaders asking their teams for a deck to be made so said leader can present it to the leadership team, or getting someone to write their weekly updates.
These requests cascade down the org, leading to distraction and frustration because the senior exec is optimising for looking good to senior leadership rather than pushing the work forward. Decisions can ultimately be made, but they slow down everything by 3-6 months, which is a lot these days.
This is really hard to solve for once an exec is in place - so the focus should be on both ends: making sure you catch teleprompter leaders at the hiring phase (can they still ship as an IC?) and firing fast when this sort of behaviour creeps up (is the business review deck overly polished?).
In essence, fostering a strong PM-PMM relationship transcends mere role definition. It demands cultivating "mutual legibility," where both functions deeply understand and respect each other's contributions. Shared systems and a mindset that treats go-to-market strategies as products are crucial. Organizations must resist the pitfalls of "teleprompter leaders" and prioritize hiring individuals who can both strategize and execute. By raising the bar for both PMs and PMMs, companies can create a self-reinforcing partnership that drives impactful outcomes, regardless of the company's stage.